1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a billing system. More particularly, this invention relates to a billing system which provides enhanced forced accounting and reduced billing features.
2. Related Art
There are a number of software billing systems which exist in the art. These commonly do include a manual entry of time and enable in-house creation of a bill. These systems fail to adequately alleviate important problems associated with billing systems.
For example, some of these systems require that the service provider input time and then create a bill. However, the trend of professionals is to become more self-sufficient in their jobs and often requires the professional, accountant or lawyer for example, to become more computer-interactive and produce much of the work product. Depending upon the particular profession, there is a need to accurately account for and bill a client as a function of time spent on a particular matter.
Accounting for phone time remains troublesome. This is due to the fact that many of the calls which are made or received on behalf of a client may only account for a couple of minutes time to the professional and becomes either a nuisance to the professional to administratively log, bill and follow up weighed against the actual amount of time billed. Additionally, when the professional currently logs phone call time, it is commonly done in a preset increment of an hour, such as a sixth (10 minutes) of an hour, to account not only for the phone time, but also for the administrative time for billing and accounting. This can result in the client being over charged for the actual professional time spent. A further problem is the unproductive time spent in administrative tasks relating to billing and accounting. There is also a need for an improved method of tracking accounts receivables.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a better billing system. The present invention overcomes these limitations.